The Americas

Organised crime in Mexico

Yet another victim

ORGANISED crime appears to have claimed another prominent political scalp in Mexico. Jesús Silverio Cavazos Ceballos, who served as governor of the tiny state of Colima until November 2009, was gunned down by three men outside his home yesterday morning. So far the killers, who arrived in a Jeep that had been reported stolen in the state of Querétaro, have not been found, nor a motive established.

With a murder rate last year of 8.7 per 100,000 people, Colima fell well below the Mexican average. But according to a count by Reforma, a Mexican newspaper, things have deteriorated since then. So far in 2010 Reforma has counted 61 crimes linked to drug trafficking in the state, compared with 12 last year and five in 2008. Three gangs (the Sinaloa “cartel”, Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana) are said to be fighting for control of the Pacific trafficking route, which Colima, Mexico's second-smallest state by population, has the bad fortune to be right in the middle of. Mr Ceballos, a member of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had been the subject of rumours linking him to drug traffickers during his period in office, but nothing was proven.

The murder may well never be solved. Still no one has been found guilty of the killing of Rodolfo Torre Cantú, who was just a few days away from near-certain election as governor of Tamaulipas when he was shot dead in June. At least a dozen mayors have been murdered this year. Diego Fernández de Cevallos, a former presidential candidate of the ruling National Action Party, is still missing after being kidnapped in May.

The motives for the killing or capture of these bigwigs remain murky. But the reasons are more obvious for many of the victims of Mexico's drug war. Mexico's trafficking gangs often leave calling cards alongside their victims. These narcomensajes, as the blood-stained cardboard signs are known, usually say why the victim met an unpleasant end: for talking, robbing, belonging to the wrong gang, or any number of other offences.

A story this month in Nexos, a magazine, has analysed these messages to come up with a rough breakdown of the reasons behind the executions. Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez, a public policy analyst, looked at 149 of the gruesome epitaphs, left in the final seven months of last year, in which he found 177 different messages. Just under half the victims had been killed because they belonged to a rival gang, or were deemed to have trespassed on forbidden turf. Some 6% were policemen. A further 17% were murdered either for being informants or traitors to the gang.

The remainder were perhaps the most interesting. These victims were murdered, according to the messages hung around their necks or scrawled on their clothing, as punishment for committing non-drug-related crimes. Robbers and perpetrators of assaults made up the majority; most of the rest were alleged kidnappers. A small proportion were alleged to have been extortionists—killed, Mr Guerrero reckons, for falsely claiming membership of a gang in order to give their threats more weight. The sample was only a small snapshot of the vast numbers of murders that took place in Mexico last year. Nonetheless, it is worrisome that some three out of ten victims were vigilante killings for crimes unrelated to the drugs business.

Prohibition is actually an authoritarian War on the Constitution and all civic institutions of our great nation.

It's all about the market and cost/benefit analysis. Whether any particular drug is good, bad, or otherwise is irrelevant! As long as there is demand for any mind altering substance, there will be supply; the end! The only affect prohibiting it has is to drive the price up, increase the costs and profits, and where there is illegal profit to be made criminals and terrorists thrive.

The cost of criminalizing citizens who are using substances no more harmful than similar things that are perfectly legal like alcohol and tobacco, is not only hypocritical and futile, but also simply not worth the incredible damage it does.

Afghani farmers produce approx. 93% of the world's opium which is then, mostly, refined into street heroin then smuggled throughout Eastern and Western Europe.

Both the Taliban and the terrorists of al Qaeda derive their main income from the prohibition-inflated value of this very easily grown crop, which means that Prohibition is the "Goose that laid the golden egg" and the lifeblood of terrorists as well as drug cartels. Only those opposed, or willing to ignore this fact, want things the way they are.

Prohibition provides America's sworn enemies with financial "aid" and tactical "comforts". The Constitution of the United States of America defines treason as:
"Article III / Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."

Support for prohibition is therefor an act of treason against the Constitution, and a dire threat to the nation's civic institutions.

The Founding Fathers were not social conservatives who believed that citizens should be subordinate to any particular narrow religious moral order. That is what the whole concept of unalienable individual rights means, and sumptuary laws, especially in the form of prohibition, were something they continually warned about.

It’s time for us all to wise up and help curtail the dangerous expansions of federal police powers, the encroachments on individual liberties, and the increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the unworkable and dangerous policy of drug prohibition.

To support prohibition you have to be either a socialist, ignorant, stupid, brainwashed, insane or corrupt.

* The US national debt has increased at an average rate of $3,000,000000 per day since 2006. http://www.usdebtclock.org/
* The unemployment rate has increased by 7300 per day since 2008.
* The loss of manufacturing jobs has been 1400 per day since 2006.
* Without the legalized regulation of opium products Afghanistan will continue to be a bottomless pit in which to throw countless billions of tax dollars and wasted American lives.
* The hopeless situation in Afghanistan is helping to destabilize it's neighbor, Pakistan, which is a country with nuclear weapons.
* The mayhem in Mexico has deteriorated so badly that it’s bordering on farcical.

There is nothing conservative about prohibition, which enlists the most centralized state power in displacement of domestic and community roles. There is everything authoritarian and subversive about this policy which has incinerated American traditions such as Freedom and Federalism with its puritanical flames. Any person seeking to insure and not further compromise the safety of their family and of their neighbors must not only repudiate prohibition but help spearhead its abolition.

We will always have adults who are too immature to responsibly deal with tobacco alcohol, heroin amphetamines, cocaine, various prescription drugs and even food. Our answer to them should always be: "Get a Nanny, and stop turning the government into one for the rest of us!"

For someone who thinks they understand conservatism its interesting how the poster minsunderstands the core conservatism principles. The Evangelical movement hijacked the conservative agenda decadso ago so conservism as it exists today CLEARLY calls for legislation of morality.

In reality the OP's principles are much more aligned with Libertarian principles.

Mexico is no longer a nation of laws. It has become a nation of retribution. The culture has become similar to the Middle Eastern cultures where the foundation of the culture is the family and the family is sacrosanct. When the family is threatened it fights back with equal and lethal response. Mexico is regressing to a medieval state and I do not see any way out of it. My philosophy is to legalize the main component of the problem...drugs....and to do everything in our power to (as Americans) to help change the culture of warlords. Democracy in Mexico is a farce and will not be to our standards for several generations. The economic inequalities in Mexican society are paramount in the struggle to calm the culture of retribution. I see in the US a ever increasing slide to the same parameters. Our economic system is fast becoming a culture of mega haves and a subculture of self defining havenots. We are seeing ourselves, in Mexico, in a couple of decades unless we begin to re-establish the middle class and allow the less fortunate have hope.

The Primary Fundamental Right is the most basic of all human rights. It is the innate right of a person to the ownership of their own body and the right to do what they want to that body.

People who don't believe that the Primary Fundamental Right exists should ask themselves this question; can you do anything you want to your body and not have the possibility of going to jail for doing so? The answer is definitely no. Because of legal constraints we are all slaves. We are not a free people, regardless of what we may think. Therefore all the freedoms we think we have are really illusions unless we own our own bodies. Remember, only slaves cannot make decisions about their own bodies.

Every one of us, including the politicians, are now owned by our respective governments because of numerous iniquitous laws, including the drug prohibition laws and statutory rape laws that they the politicians have enacted supposedly on instruction from the majority of voters. In reality we have all been caught up in a swirling Socialism torrent sliding downwards towards Totalitarianism for over 100 years. The drug prohibition laws are a symptom of that progression, but not the root cause.

The Primary Fundamental Right exists because everything, with the possible exception of God, has an opposite and the opposite of Totalitarianism is the Primary Fundamental Right.

But the drug laws are there to protect us.
Unfortunately with this sort of protection we are definitely doomed. This is because these laws restrict people to using only tobacco and alcohol which kill and maim far more of us than all the illegal drugs, car accidents, plane crashes, murders and 9/11's combined.

While it's certainly true Mexicans are busy meeting the demand from up north, blaming the firearm industries and the junkies for Mexico's woes is seriously misguided.

To apply this wicked logic is to ask why Canadians are not busy killing each other to supply drugs to the junkies down south. The current state of Mexico is more of a reflection of its ineffective government/social system than any outside factors. Suggesting any otherwise will only prolong Mexico's misery.

"Sicarios" are murderers for hire. Paramilitary thugs can be asked to get rid of thieves and drug-pushers.Or you can ring up the police, when you have a problem. They take the delinquents to a judge, and the next day he is out again free on the streets. Or perhaps he goes to prison, which we pay for, and comes out embittered and resentful (against you). Many laws and little justice.So people exercise their own justice. The guerrilla thinks it has the right to apply people's justice. The Argentine generals are jailed by ex-guerrillero politicians for having saved their country. And so on and so on. Just let me sleep peacefully. I was kidnapped for nearly a year. He who takes the sword ( or the drug) dies by the sword.

Narcotics are the indication of sick societies. Healing an entire nation is a big ask. Eliminating the people who traffic and finance narcotics is easier. Make it a mandatory death sentence for anyone in the drug trade and back it up with massive military force until the evil people are dead will solve the trafficking issue. Show no mercy because the evil people dont.

If you stopped to think about it, the root cause of drug-related violence in Mexico, falls squarely on the shoulders of it's drug-addicted neighbours to the north, viz: Americans.

If there were no drug addicts north of its border, or more pragmaticaly, if drugs were decriminalised & legalised in the US, violence would plummet drasticaly in Mexico. Especially so in view of the fact that the 'war-against-drugs' fiasco is & was an abject & utter failure, from the get-go.

The war against drugs was a lost cause from the very inception, as the weapons industry in the US would go broke otherwise. If the illegal, albeit highly lucrative, trafficking of weapons south of the border, to meet the insatiable & growing demands of the drug cartels & drug-lords, petered out, the weapons industry in the north would be the first & major monetary victim.

Legalize all mind altering substances aftersought by consumers, and the violence in Mexico like else where in the socalled civilized world would be decimated. Besides, government revenues from legal distribution of those very drugs, would do its bit to lower the fiscal imbalances in most countries. Find those who thrive from prohibition, point at them and redicule them. They are the ones you´ve got to blame for a fair proportion of violent crimes in the world today. You´d be surprised, if you could follow the money circling in the drug trade and see who´s on the take.

It seems illogical to lend weight to the fact that 30% of the murders are not drug related. Certainly they may not be on face value, but the issue begging to be addressed is not the motive for murder, but the cultural influences that make murder an acceptable, as well as viable course of action. And in Mexico, the cartel warfare and homicide has established a culture of violence, one in which problems are 'removed,' mafia-style, rather than resolved.

In every culture individual decisions are informed by greater trends, and it is definitely worrying that the chaos caused by the cartels is encouraging unrelated murders. However, it would be a mistake to think that the 30% could be removed without addressing the drug related 70%, or that the 30% will remain when actions are taken against the cartels. The two categories are wedded to each other--and certainly the cartels remain the bigger problem.